‘Best block party ever.’ Neighbors wait to break bear’s fall as it’s coaxed from tree

Residents in a neighborhood in Michigan got quite the show on Mother’s Day when a black bear got stuck in a tree in someone’s front lawn, according to local reports.

Residents in the Traverse City neighborhood noticed police blocking off sections of the road around 7 a.m. on Sunday, May 14, WPBN/WGTU reported. Traverse City is about 210 miles northwest of Detroit.

Video taken by a resident shows the bear hanging out on a thick limb of the tree while neighbors watch from driveways and a photographer snaps photos of the bear, which had climbed about 30-feet up into the tree, the station reported.

Crowds gathered on Fifth Street near Maple Street to watch the sleepy bear — which had been shot with tranquilizers — in its perch, the Traverse City Record-Eagle reported.

“It’s like the best block party ever,” Annette Anderson told the Associated Press.

Wildlife biologists and officers from the Department of Natural Resources partnered with a power company to safely lower the bear to the ground, Steve Griffith told McClatchy News. Griffith is a wildlife biologist with the state’s Department of Natural Resources. Technicians with the power company hoisted him up in a bucket truck so he could dart the bear from a close range, he said.

But with all the commotion, including regular sounds of the city as well as neighbors running a pump and one doing lawn work, they couldn’t get the bear to calm down and let the tranquilizing drugs take effect, he said.

“They get scared and a boost of adrenaline or other hormones counteracts the drug,” Griffith said. It took several darts to get the 350-pound male to go under.

Once the bear was asleep, power technicians tried hooking him up to a rope rescue system, the same way they would rescue an injured colleague from a utility pole, he said.

But it didn’t all go according to plan, and the sleeping bear dropped from the tree. Luckily someone had hauled out mattresses to cushion the fall, Griffith said.

“You never want to see that, but that is the nature of it,” Griffith said. “They climb trees and have accidents in the wild, so they are pretty resilient.”

Officials checked over the bear on the ground and determined he was OK. He started waking from the drugs within half an hour, Griffith said.

After that, officials drove him at least 60 miles away and released him on state land, Griffith said.

It wasn’t the first time it’s happened in Traverse City, he said. Between the Boardman River and multiple creeks that enter into Traverse Bay and around the urban area, there’s plenty of corridors for wildlife to use and end up in places they usually would rather not be.

“More often it’s a deer, but once in a while we do get a bear that is using that river and the bordering woods as a travel corridor and we find them in town,” he said.

It’s possible the bear found a food source in the area but got scared by something and scrambled into the tree for safety, he said.

“It made for a long Sunday, but it was a good ending,” he said.

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